GamesIndustry International - Fez, Fish and The Problem with Patching.Fez has grossed over a million dollars, and even after Microsoft has taken a lump of that, it would be outright negligent and irresponsible of Fish not to have money left over to cover an unforeseen problem like a reissued patch. Catch-22. If you're able to complain about it, you're also able to pay for it, and your users are quite entitled to excoriate you for using them as hostages in a debate with Microsoft which is of no real relevance to them.

"I don't care how indie you are, or how free and loose your ideas of commerce and creativity may be - once you've taken a million bucks from consumers, professionalism isn't optional" Equally, though, one can have sympathy with Microsoft. The company gives one patch for free, and charges for subsequent patches - not because it's greedy and avaricious (it does lots of other things for those reasons, of course), but because it doesn't want to see XBLA games being released buggy or incomplete and patched repeatedly. The Xbox is a console, and players expect not to be confronted with the kind of endless match of bugs and patches which so often afflict PC games. Microsoft has a duty to its consumers to try to enforce that, and ultimately, Fish bears responsibility for creating a patch with such a serious bug in it.

I think Micro$oft has a bad patch policy, but Fish knew what he was getting into. It is his company's fault that the game has some significant bugs, including wiping out everything a player has put into the game, and he has made money from releasing the game. On top of that, he is talking about releasing on other platforms - about making further money - and his answer is "f*ck off" to the gamers negatively impacted by his company's programming faults?

It is not that they cannot resolve the issue, it is not that they do not have the money to do so, it is not that they can give guidance to people on how to avoid it or use a workaround - his answer is simply that it is not worth it to him to patch it.

And what if his game needs another patch? Or there were bigger issues? A larger player base was affected? Just screw those people, too?Creating, hyping, and selling a game have expectation repercussions.Thinking issues with Micro$oft are not grounds for destroying saves,Ray